Featured articles

Returning to Rails in 2026: Building a modern application with the web framework that shook everything up in the early 2000s.

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

Centreon review

One of my favourite interview questions I used to ask candidates was a variation of "Desert Island Discs" : Imagine you are going off to be a sysadmin on a desert island, with no internet access, and further imagine that the previous sysadmin was a total fascist with a minimalist install policy. We’re talking a bare-bones "classic" Solaris installation, or a minimal Debian system here. You’ve got SSH installed, but not much else. Before you hop on the boat, however, you ar...

Cacti iostat scripts now support FreeBSD

Thanks to the awesome work of Boogie Shafer, there is now a FreeBSD port of my iostat scripts and templates for Cacti. I have included the modified tarball that was sent to me, this is inside the archive as "cacti-iostat-1.x-boogie_freebsd_linux_changes.tar.gz".

Dell MD3000i

I’ve just got a new array to play with at work for a small Xen virtualisation setup. It’s the Dell MD3000i, which I’ve seen a few posts about before but though I’d chime in with my experiences. It is a budget array, but I have to say for the price it’s not a bad bit of kit.

Building a redundant iSCSI and NFS cluster with Debian - Part 5

This is part 5 of a series on building a redundant iSCSI and NFS SAN with Debian.

Updated Cacti iostat package now supports Solaris

Just a quick update to my Cacti iostat monitoring scripts and templates - thanks to the work of Marwan Shaher and Eric Schoeller, the package now supports Solaris! The updated package is available here :  cacti-iostat-1.4.tar.gz. I have also updated the original blog post with the new package.